“I’m here to congratulate this school and hold it up for the
nation to see what is possible when you raise the bar, when you’re
not afraid to hold people to account, and when you empower teachers
and principals.”
Those were President Bush’s words last week as he toured the
Laclede Elementary School in St. Louis, a largely African-American
institution where students have raised their grade-level reading
rates from 7 percent in 1999 to 80 percent today.
The President had good reason to be proud — but also good
reason to worry. Two years after his No Child Left Behind
educational reform bill passed 98-1 in the Senate, the consensus on
educational reform is beginning to unravel. And it isn’t just
Democratic presidential candidates who are complaining.
In November the Reading, Pennsylvania school board sued the
state and federal governments, arguing that NCLB has created an
unfair financial burden. The district is caught between a soaring
immigrant population (11 percent Spanish-speaking) and a crumbling
industrial base, which has reduced property tax revenues from $34
million to $22 million in the last eight years. When the state
flunked 13 of the district’s 19 schools and ordered it to begin
private tutoring programs under NCLB, the district filed suit.
“This is not an Ozzie and Harriet world,” said the lawyer
representing the district, Richard Guida. “We can’t just waive a
magic wand and make our problems go away.”
Reading isn’t the only district objecting. Cheshire,
Connecticut, recently turned down $80,000 in federal school funding
tied to NCLB, arguing that the bureaucracy and paperwork involved
in dividing students into racial and ethnic groupings and testing
their abilities weren’t worth it. In Utah, Republican legislator
Kory Hodaway has introduced a bill that would prevent the state
from accepting $100 million in funding tied to NCLB. “This law
amounts to an unfunded mandate,” said Rep. Hodaway — using the
dread term reminiscent of Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America.”
Everywhere, school districts are complaining that NCLB is just
another layer of top-down reform requiring teachers to abandon
their regular curriculum and “teach to the test.”
There is more than a little irony in this. Ten years ago, in
making the classic case for school vouchers and educational choice,
John Chubb and Terry Moe argued that such reform efforts were what
was wrong with the public schools. “The typical pattern is for
dissident groups to seize control of the administrative apparatus
through elections or reform campaigns,” wrote Chubb and Moe in
Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools. “Then they
impose change from the top down.” The result, the authors said, was
layer upon archaeological layer of educational mandates, under
which all teacher independence and initiative were soon buried.
“The teachers respond by turning to their unions to resist all
change,” said Chubb and Moe. The resulting stalemate between school
administrations and teacher unions was the norm of public
education.
Has No Child Left Behind become just another set of top-down
mandates, this time imposed by the federal government?
“That’s a good point,” says Moe, who holds fellowships at both
the Hoover and Brookings Institutions. “It’s true there’s a
top-down aspect, with people at the top trying to control what
people at the bottom are doing. But there’s also a bottom-up
element that allows parents and children to seek alternatives
outside the system.”
Under NCLB, states must test their schools for performance,
making all sorts of differentiations between different racial and
ethnic groups - a thicket that Republicans may eventually regret.
“The purpose is so that you aren’t just measuring student
background,” says Moe. “The tests are looking for improvement — or
lack of it.”
If schools score egregiously low or fail to show improvement,
they must be designated at “failing.” This allows parents and
children to opt out — or to demand special tutoring programs.
Although Congress appropriated $5 billion for these programs, much
of the burden will still fall upon the local school districts.
“What gives this law its historic dimension is the
accountability,” says John Chubb, Moe’s co-author, now chief
education officer at Edison Schools. “This is the first time in the
nation’s history that the federal government has stepped up and
said, ‘We expect something of our schools.’”
The trick will be to demand accountability without having this
all degenerate into just another pretext for the liberals’ favorite
solution — throwing more money at existing schools. The ACLU
already has a long-standing class action against the Compton
Unified School District in Los Angeles for failure to provide its
pupils with a safe and adequate education. In New York liberal
reform groups are now using the state constitution to jack up
school funding — already among the highest in the country.
Meanwhile, Democrats have quickly abandoned their support for No
Child Left Behind. Every Democratic presidential candidate is
calling for more funding and front-runner Howard Dean has rejected
it altogether. Senator Edward Kennedy, who led Democratic
supporters in the Senate, is now asking for additional
billions.
And so it may be time for Republicans to return to the other
element of the school reform — vouchers, charter schools, and
school choice. Republicans gave up these options in 2001 in an
effort to win Democratic support in Congress. As a result, even
children in “failing” schools have no option except to transfer to
another school in the same district. Catholic schools, private
schools, and home schooling - all of which are showing notable
success — are not among the options.
“No Child Left Behind has at least increased our understanding
of where we stand,” says Christopher Smith, executive director of
the Internet Educational Exchange (iEdx), an Arizona-based reform
group. “The testing has served as a thermometer to tell us which
patients have a fever. But the options for a cure are still very
limited.”
The Exchange supports home schooling, public and private school
vouchers, on-line education, and a wide variety of options as
alternatives for failing public schools. “Education is very
complex,” says Smith, who served as policy director and chief of
staff in the Arizona State Senate before founding iEdx in 2003.
“There is no one solution for everybody. Our idea is to introduce
as much variety and competition into the system as possible.”
Not a bad strategy. The first congressional session after a Bush
landslide victory in 2004 might be a good time to start.
